The fallacy of blaming Korean ‘culture’ for Asiana crash

The wreckage from Saturday’s deadly Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco was still smoldering when some pundits started pointing the blame at a suspected culprit: South Korean “culture.”

Journalists and other commentators have run with a theory from “Outliers,” a 2008 book in which New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell examined factors leading to a spree of crashes in the 1990s by Asiana’s larger rival Korean Air — including, he contended, a Korean tradition of deference to authority. References to Gladwell and his book have abounded this week, both on Twitter and in media like NPR, CNBC, Salon, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

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For starters, the pilot at the controls Saturday was not the authority figure in the cockpit. His co-pilot had thousands more hours of experience and was serving as the instructor, giving him no reason to feel squeamish about speaking up if he saw something wrong.

That’s on top of the fact that Gladwell wasn’t writing about Asiana, and that even Korean Air has long since overcome its problems to become what he calls “one of the world’s best airlines.” And of course, U.S. investigators haven’t even determined the cause of last week’s accident, despite early evidence hinting at the crew’s failure to realize in time that they were flying too slowly as they undershot the runway.

Blaming an entire nation’s culture is “ridiculous,” said Sam Yoon, president of the Council of Korean Americans. “People are just grasping at straws” to explain the crash, he said.

Yoon acknowledged that, by and large, Koreans are more deferential to their elders than what one sees in America, but he says that’s no reason to blame a culture that most Americans don’t know much about. “A lot of what Americans learn about Korea is probably through Psy,” he quipped.

The sudden focus on culture seemed awfully selective to John Lie, a sociology professor at the University of California-Berkeley who was born in South Korea and has studied the country.

“It seems unlikely that if this were a United plane, we would be wondering about American culture as a major source of the accident,” Lie said by email.

Gladwell’s book notes that deference in the cockpit has also been a problem in countries like the U.S., and says teaching junior crew members to speak “clearly and assertively” has been “one of the great crusades in commercial aviation.” He cites as one example the 1982 crash of an Air Florida jet into the Potomac River, in which flight-recorder transcripts showed the first officer merely hinting to the pilot about ice on the wings before takeoff.

Still, much of the commentary following Saturday’s crash seems based on the idea that such problems are unique to Koreans.

“Did Korean culture contribute to San Francisco plane crash?” asked a headline Tuesday in the San Jose Mercury News. Fox Business host Tom Sullivan weighed in on the network Monday, invoking Gladwell’s book while arguing that “the culture in Korea was you never, ever question your superior.”

CNN also aired a report by correspondent Kyung Lah speculating about the possible role of South Korea’s “hierarchical” culture in the crash, though without mentioning Gladwell, and National Geographic examined the debate over whether the book’s ideas apply in the San Francisco accident.

A reporter even alluded to the issue at a Wednesday press briefing on the crash, asking NTSB Chairwoman Debbie Hersman whether the Asiana co-pilot had shown “deference” to the pilot.

Hersman didn’t bite at any ethnic implications but pointed out that the co-pilot was the “pilot in command” who had ultimate responsibility for the flight’s safety.

“We are certainly interested to see if there are any issues where there are challenges to crew communication, if there’s an authority gradient where people won’t challenge one another,” she said. But she pointed out that the aviation industry has dealt with this problem for decades, “to make sure that a junior pilot feels comfortable challenging a senior pilot, and to make sure that a senior pilot welcomes feedback.”